Sunday, May 13, 2012

Here's a very memorable '80s song, that also is very much a reminder of the history and politics of that era: "99 Luftballons" by German singer Nena. The song came out in German in 1983, followed by an English version in 1984.

The song is a protest song about the fear of nuclear war, which was often present in the midst of the Cold War. The Cold War, the sometimes tense competition between capitalist democracy and communism, was a fact of life since the late '40s, until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 (with the Soviet Union falling shortly after in 1991).

The early '80s saw an uptick in the tensions between East and West, as both superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) installed new nuclear missiles in Europe. According to Wikipedia:

While at a June 1982 concert by the Rolling Stones in West Berlin,

Nena's guitarist Carlo Karges noticed that balloons were being

released. As he watched them move toward the horizon, he noticed

them shifting and changing shapes, where they looked like strange

spacecraft (referred to in the German lyrics as a "UFO"). He thought

about what might happen if they floated over the Berlin Wall to

the Soviet sector.

Both the English and German versions tell about two children who

buy 99 balloons at a toy shop and release them into the air, where

faulty East German radar equipment registers the balloons as

incoming weapons. The government immediately put their troops on

red alert and scrambles fighter jets to intercept, which ultimately

triggers anuclear war between East and West. In the apocalyptic

aftermath, the song's narrator stands in the rubble of the city and

finds a single remaining balloon. Thinking of someone, she then

lets the balloon go. The music was composed by Uwe

Fahrenkrog-Petersen, the keyboardist of Nena's band, while

Karges wrote the original German lyrics.

In the United States, the song was released in both German and English language versions, and I remember my friends and I would sometimes talk about which version sounded better. The German one always won hands down.